The 973 Program is China's keystone national research program established to support basic research in natural and physical sciences. In addition to promoting the development of core technology and scientific infrastructure needed to enable China to meet the social and economic challenges of the 21st century, the training and mentoring of the new generation of China's young scientists are also ...

The regulation of cell migration is a highly complex process that is often compromised when cancer cells become metastatic. The microtubule cytoskeleton is necessary for cell migration, but how microtubules and microtubule-associated proteins regulate multiple pathways promoting cell migration remains unclear. Microtubule plus-end binding proteins (+TIPs) are emerging as important players in ma...

Since data envelopment analysis (DEA) introduced in 1970s, it has been widely applied to measure the efficiency of a wide variety of production and operation systems. Recently DEA has been extended to examine the efficiency of decision making units (DMUs) with two-stage network structures or processes, where the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs of t...

Polar cell expansion in differentiating tissues is critical for the development and morphogenesis of plant organs and is modulated by hormonal and developmental signals, yet little is known about signaling in this fundamental process in plants. In contrast to tip-growing cells, such as pollen tubes and root hairs, cells in developing tissues are thought to expand by diffuse growth. In this stud...

We analyse pricing, e¤ort and tipping decisions at the online service "Google Answers". Users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, and they can additionally tip the researcher who provided the answer ex post. A positive wage-e¤ort relationship is frequently found in laboratory giftexchange games, yet …eld evidence for reciprocity in two-stage settings is mixed. Our …eld data co...

The present study explains a steady-state method of measuring convective heat transfer coefficient on the casing of an axial flow turbine. The goal is to develop an accurate steady-state heat transfer method for the comparison of various casing surface and tip designs used for turbine performance improvements. The freestream reference temperature, especially in the tip gap region of the casing,...

Environmental regulators often use environmental policy to induce green investment by firms. However, if an environmental policy fails to exert a long-run effect on regulating the economic agents' behavior, it may be more reasonable to think of the firm as the leader in the game, since the investment in green technology is usually a strategic decision. In this paper, we consider a three-stage S...

Measures of contrast sensitivity and colour vision were taken from a group of 18 multiple sclerosis patients. Contrast sensitivity losses, measured at 5 spatial frequencies and 4 temporal frequencies, were found to be significant in 11 patients. Red/green (Rayleigh equation) and green/blue (Engelking-Trendelenburg equation) Pickford-Nicolson anomaloscope settings were abnormal in 15 patients. C...